How would you like to get your hands on a custom built Tesla Roadster?

Bitcoin Latinum, a digital asset associated with award winning movie studios and globally renowned insurance brokers, is offering you that chance.

The digital asset, which has been described as the “next generation of Bitcoin fork” for its ability to “break barriers… that have prevented some virtual currencies from achieving… real-time use”, sold out of its initial public presale in November 2020.

To celebrate it coming to the market again later this year, Bitcoin Latinum is giving away eight custom Tesla Roadsters and you’re not even required to buy anything to be in with a chance of winning.

You can enter the draw over on shop.bitcoinlatinum.com.

You can enter until the end of April and the draw will be made later this year when the Bitcoin Latinum hard fork is launched.

This highly anticipated Bitcoin Latinum has been in the news already over the last few months, being slated as the “world’s largest insured digital asset”. Globally renowned brokers Marsh and McLennan’s Asia division has been appointed for it.

Its association with movie studio, Cross Creek Media, also hit the headlines. The studio, who made Oscar winner Black Swan, has adapted the asset.

Its CEO, Timmy Thomspon discussed this move, stating: “Cross Creek’s portfolio of new media technology investments perfectly positions us to take advantage of the digital asset sector in media and gaming.”

Huobi Futures has just celebrated over $2.6 trillion in cumulative trading volumes since its launch just over two years ago.

Its launch date was December 10, 2018 and ever since then, the trading platform has gone from strength to strength, now being considered one of the go-to places for derivitace product options.

A constant look towards the future and a aim to expand its product options have helped its growth. For instance, USDT-margined Swaps, Coin-margined swaps and futures are among the services that are central to Huobi’s offering currently.

This is demonstrated by USDT-margined Swaps accounting for almost 23 percent of the trading volume of all units as of December 3rd. Huobi’s coin-margined futures trading, which includes 13 major crypto assets, also has had a unilateral turnover of $1,907bn since its launch.

Not only that, but Huobi’s coin-margined swaps is the no.1 coin-margined swaps market globally.

Its trading volume of USDT margined perpetual swaps is also growing, with a cumulative total of over $60.5 billion as of December 4th, 2020. Earlier this year, Huobi further demonstrated their ability to offer an excellent service, by launching USDT-quoted options whereby users could trade without worrying about the risk of liquidation.

A statement from Huobi aimed to explain their success, citing the following: “The fact that Huobi Futures has achieved this success in just two years is largely due to its continuous efforts to launch innovative products that continuously enhance the user experience while ensuring that users can trade securely, consistently, and at a low cost.

This has a profound impact on two aspects for users. Since Huobi Futures started the operation in 2018, it has been able to provide users with a safe, stable and low-cost trading experience.”

With Upfiring 1.2.2, seamless decentralized P2P file-sharing is now possible on the Ethereum blockchain. With our product ready for user adoption, the project’s focus will be shifting towards towards community growth and marketing for the second half of 2020.

Upfiring 1.2.2 Release — August 24th, 2020

Upfiring 1.2.2 has been deployed and is available for download on upfiring.com. This update fixes an important connection issue that will improve the dapp’s ability to discover and connect to other peers/seeders on the network. Upfiring 1.2.2’s release will ensure the dapp is ready for a growing userbase of downloaders and seeders in the coming weeks. Existing Upfiring dapp users will be prompted on application launch to update their application, or they can navigate to the “Settings” tab and click “Check for updates”, as seen below.

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Important Link Updates:

• ufr.exchange now allows you quick access to the UFR-ETH market on Uniswap
• ufr.chat links to our forums, which have been relaunched and will be further updated this week
• upfiring.com homepage will be updated this week with new links/information as well

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Marketing

• Dapp Stress Tests
• Upcoming AMAS
• Influencer Marketing
• The Upfiring Blog, Press Releases, & SEO campaign
• Expansion of the Upfiring Dapp Documentation
• File-Sharing website outreach
• Community-run marketing group and community contributions
• Paid advertisements

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EVENTS

Upfiring Dapp Stress Tests (3)

The Upfiring Stress tests will evaluate Upfiring’s ability to support files with large numbers of seeders and properly distribute UFR between all active seeders on a file. It will also test out the networks capability to have many files decrypted in a short period of time. There will be 3 major stress tests in the coming months. Note: The amount of UFR offered during these events is subject to change if the UFR price fluctuates significantly. In addition, pending the results of each of these stress tests, the dates are subject to change as well.

Stress Test 1: 500 UFR Total — Sunday, September 20th, 2020 at 5 PM EST

• 5 .ufr files, each worth 100 UFR, will be created by our team and distributed via our social media pages one week prior to the stress test (September 13th to September 20th)
• We will decrypt the files one by one, rewarding all participating seeders with a share of the UFR equal to 100/# of seeders for each file

Stress Test 2: 2,000 UFR Total — Sunday, October 4th, 2020 at 5 PM EST

• The results of Stress Test 1 will be analyzed and the procedure of Stress Test 2 may be adjusted if necessary
• 10 .ufr files, each worth 150–250 UFR, will be created by our team and distributed via our social media pages one week prior to the stress test (September 27th to October 4th)
• Files will be decrypted as with Stress Test 1

Stress Test 3: 5,000 UFR Total — Sunday, October 18th, 2020 at 5 PM EST

• 50 .ufr files, each worth 50–150 UFR, will be created by our team and distributed via our social media pages one week prior to the stress test (October 11th to October 18th)

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Upfiring’s Upcoming AMAS (Ask-Me-Anything) & Appearances

In an effort to expand the size of our community and introduce new users to Upfiring, we have been working with closely with several Telegram groups, Youtubers, Discord groups, and influencers to plan several major events for this project. The following groups will have AMAs for Upfiring in the coming weeks. Any TBD dates will be announced via our social media when they are set:

• GosuTV, Korean audience — set for Wednesday, September 9th at 9 PM EST
• TheGemHunters, a 2500+ Telegram group — set for Sunday, September 20th at 2 PM EST
• @cryptowindonesia, an Indonesian audience of over 7500+ people, translator will be used — date pending

In addition, we plan to appear on several Influencer’s Channels in September and October including:

• CryptoWendy (date set)
• Several other major appearances are set, and we cannot disclose them until the air date!

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The Upfiring Blog, Press Releases, and SEO campaign

SEO is one of the primary ways people discover new and growing projects. Upfiring will begin an SEO campaign that will focus on increasing the overall quantity of content released on our website and improving upon the quality/scope of that content. This will help to create an influx of new members in our community.

The Upfiring Blog, to be located as a subset of the upfiring.com website, will be a major contributor to the growth and promotion of Upfiring. We will be publishing content dealing with issues surrounding file-sharing, file storage, decentralization, and various other relevant topics to our project.

In addition, the dapp’s documentation will be improved to include more important information for new users, such as several potential use cases for Upfiring and how to maximize usage and earnings as a content creator.

File-Sharing Website Outreach

Because the Upfiring application does not allow the direct sharing of files within the dapp, external file-sharing websites are absolutely critical to the success of this project. There are several Upfiring file-sharing websites in existence right now. In order to help these sites grow, we will be working with the developers to provide key information from our source code that will allow new and existing websites to easily analyze the metadata of .ufr files, number of seeders on a file, and other key information as well.

We will also be spending time over the next few weeks reaching out to existing file-sharing websites to help them integrate .ufr files into their sites.

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Community-run marketing groups and community contributions

Upfiring needs the help of the community in order to reach its full potential. We have one of the most decentralized Ethereum projects in the space — with our team owning an extremely small portion of the token supply relative to other projects, and having little to no control over the Upfiring smart contracts/dapp activity now that they are deployed. Our team does not profit off of the application. As such, it is imperative that the community step in and help this project grow. There are already several community-run Upfiring marketing groups floating around on Discord, Telegram, and elsewhere, and these groups have already helped immensely with the start of our marketiing campaign. If you believe in our cause and want to see the widespread decentralization of content distribution, we encourage community members to take action wherever they can. If you are interested in helping with marketing activities, you can post in our Telegram group or PM @tylerfallon on Telegram for more information.

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Development

The dapp’s development will be discussed in further detail in future posts, but several important features are in the planning stages right now:

Upfiring Dapp Uniswap Integration

Funding your Upfiring wallet, obtaining UFR to use within the dapp, or converting your UFR earnings to Ethereum/other tokens is going to become a smooth experience that users will be able to do using their Upfiring wallet in the dapp. In another effort to further decentralize the dapp and remove the power that centralized exchanges have over this project, Uniswap (a decentralized exchange) will be integrated directly into the dapp. This is another huge step towards the immutability of the Upfiring network — if the Uniswap.org website goes down for any reason, you will still be able to use the smart contracts within the Upfiring dapp to convert to and from UFR with 100% uptime.

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The Upfiring Blockchain — moving to our own smart contract network with a bridge to the Ethereum network

The pre-development phase of the Upfiring blockchain has begun. Currently, we are discussing the feasibility of creating a dual-network link within the dapp that will allow for payment to be made in UFR from the new Upfiring blockchain OR on the Ethereum network via ERC20 token (as it is now). A bridge will be created that will allow users to swap between the ERC20 token and mainnet coin at with a 1:1 ratio, ensuring a fixed supply of tokens and a consistent price between the two. This will also allow us to maintain our exchange listings on important, high-volume exchanges like Uniswap.org and IDEX while creating a customizable mainnet that is not limited by issues that we’ve seen on the Ethereum network, such as high fees and congestion.

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Upfiring Web Browser Dapp

Another huge development we are currently working on that will make Upfiring more widely available to users in the space is a direct integration into Google Chrome so that Upfiring and it’s functionality may be accessed directly via website, and file download/decryption can be performed with tools like Metamask.

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This is an exciting time for this project. We have a ton of events planned in the coming months and would love to have you, the reader, join our communities and be a part of our project’s growth. You can get UFR on Uniswap here. Check out our social media pages: Telegram, Upfiring Forums, Reddit, Twitter, Bitcointalk, and Discord as we continue our mission to change the future of P2P file-sharing.

PumaPay CEO, Yoav Dror, said: “By providing innovative and much-needed developments ready to be utilized in the emerging crypto space, we bring the co

Huobi Futures to launch Bitcoin Options Trading in Q3 of 2020. 

Following the successful launch of Perpetual Swaps in Q2 of this year, Huobi Futures now has its sights on a Q3 launch for its Bitcoin Options.

Bitcoin Options are a form of financial derivatives that provide traders with the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell Bitcoin at a specific price at a certain date of expiry.

Alpha testing is already in full swing as the Huobi team looks to iron out and streamline the Options trading offering. Once complete, Huobi Futures will announce the official launch on the Web and API. The options will also then be expanded to the Huobi Trading App.

The contracts will be offered in the European style meaning that buyer of the Option can only be exercised at the expiration. The Options contracts will, at first, only be available for Bitcoin.

Options have long been a popular derivatives trading tool in the traditional space, but this type of trading has also permeated the cryptocurrency space recently. A Bitcoin Options contract is similar to a futures contract with the main difference being that the trader has an option, rather than an obligation, to buy or sell on a fixed date at an agreed upon price.

The crypto behemoth’s entry into the derivatives market has been incredibly successful so far and continues to be bolstered. The company has been sitting at the top of many metrics regarding trading volume and has rocketed to the top in Perpetual Swaps in just a few months.

Since the environment we buy our products from has become ever more global, it has become more and more difficult to keep track of where and these products are made, and if they’ve been manufactured in a way that adheres to our principles. Now, however, a new Swedish blockchain company looks set to change all that.

PaperTale is a new venture in which you’re able to trace a product from its inception using the blockchain, and it brings with it lots of new possibilities.

Let’s say you’re looking at a table, but you’re curious as to the worker’s living standards where it was made, and wish to see if they were paid a fair wage. You can scan the product with your smartphone, and check to see if the employee’s who made the table receive salaries fit for the acceptable living standards in their country.

Or perhaps you want to get verified information about the table’s supply chain and its environmental impact? Again, just scan the product with your phone and the information will be relayed to you on the screen. Using PaperTale, consumers can be much more ethical with their purchases, choosing products that benefit the workers or the environment most.

This traceability is made a reality through PaperTale by way of special protocols built on the blockchain. These enable you to see detailed facets regarding the methods and ethics used to produce the item. On top of that, through PaperTale and your smartphone, it’s possible to send tips directly to the worker who made your products, and have it verified so you can be assured your money has gone to the right people.

PaperTale has been two years in the making, and is finally ready to make its mark on the world. They already have a proof of concept, through the way of a textile company in Pakistan, where all of their new clothes are manufactured using this technology in mind. The tech isn’t limited to textiles though, with PaperTale the possibilities are almost endless.

If you’re one of the many people concerned about workers’ rights and the environment and want to ensure that what you buy is ethical and complements your principles, PaperTale is the technology that will get you where you want to be. To show your support, their crowdfunding campaign is about to go underway on Kickstarter on 13th November, where you’ll have the chance to be the first to use the new technology.

Support worker’s rights by showing your support for PaperTale.

Tap n Go (TAP) has partnered with Transact Payments Limited (TPL) to provide the Tap Prepaid Mastercard® that will allow customers to convert Crypto Assets held with TAP for spending wherever Mastercard is accepted.

The TAP accounts with multiple crypto and fiat wallets and will have access to real time crypto trading with numerous exchanges, all assets are held securely in multi signatory “cold storage” wallets or electronic money client accounts.

Tap n Go have applied to the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission for a DLT licence which is currently under review.

Arsen Torosian CEO of TAP commented: “the launch of TAP has been in the making for a number of years, our partnership with TPL for our provision of the TAP Prepaid Mastercard was the final piece of our vision. We are delighted to have TPL as our partner for this product”

Kriya Patel, MD of TNL commented: “TPL are delighted to be supporting the TAP Prepaid Mastercard project and look forward to continuing to work with such an initiative partner like TAP with the roll out of their in-demand solution”.

Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain have started to change many aspects of our lives and entertainment in recent years. However, one area that appears to have been slower than others in adopting this approach is that of gaming.

At first glance, there are a lot of areas of crossover between cryptos and gaming. Some people have even suggested that gaming paved the way for these coins to appear as per https://medium.com/singulardtv/how-video-games-helped-pave-the-way-for-cryptocurrency-f930521eef55. Yet, the expected surge in this area hasn’t appeared so far. In what ways could these industries come together in the future to change the gaming landscape?

Gaming ICOs Being Launched

There is work being done on numerous new decentralised gaming solutions. These are projects that use the blockchain and introduce their own cryptocurrencies that users can typically earn, buy or exchange.

Among the biggest and most talked about ICOs of this type is Bountie, with full details on it to be found at https://www.bountie.io/tokensale/. This is a platform that promises to use AI and IoT in order to modernise the world of gaming.

Another project of this type is called ALAX. In this case, the idea is that players in developing countries can play on their mobile devices even if they don’t have access to traditional banking facilities. The platform uses their own ALX token to monetise gaming, as described on their site, https://alax.io/tokens/.

Unless an ICO offers something new and useful, the fact that it is decentralised isn’t going to be enough. Let’s not forget that over half of all ICOS fail in the first few months too, according to the Boston College research at https://www.coindesk.com/over-half-of-icos-fail-within-4-months-suggests-us-study. So, there is no guarantee that these new platforms will succeed. Many gamers are happy to play in the ways that are currently available to them.

Indeed, among the most popular gaming options gaining ground right now are online casinos. These are websites where numerous casino games are brought together. For example, at https://casino.betfair.com/c/slots we can see dozens of slots ranging from Hot Gems to Grease and from Big Bear to Captain’s Treasure.

Playing with Digital Currencies

Another possibility is that players start to use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to fund their games online. This may seem like a natural progression, since many gamers are now used to using in-game tokens and currencies.

However, perhaps the volatility of virtual currencies will play a big part in how widespread this becomes. Since these coins can gain or lose value very rapidly, anyone who pays using them is essentially making an investment rather than simply exchanging tokens.

It seems fair to say more stable cryptocurrency prices are likely to encourage more gamers to use these coins. There are certainly some good reasons for thinking this is a good idea. For example, it allows for virtually anonymous spending and means that no link to a bank account or credit card is needed.

It wouldn’t be a big surprise if the future were to bring a closer relationship between gaming and cryptocurrencies. Having said that, it would appear that we are still waiting for the perfect combination of these technologies that allows gamers to use cryptos to their full potential.

 

 

The growth of cryptocurrencies has been a source of many headlines in the last few years. Yet, research by Finder shows that only 8% of Americans have invested in these digital currencies. What is needed to help them to truly break into the mainstream?

One suggestion is that online gaming could be the key. Could gamers around the world give Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins the boost they need to move to the next level of popularity?

Gamers Are Comfortable with Virtual Money

Perhaps the most important factor here is that gamers were comfortable dealing with virtual money long before most other people had even considered the idea. This has been an important part of many games for some time, but it is the Mesos used in MapleStory from Nexon that are widely credited as being the first gaming currency to really take off.

The most popular games now have giant economies spring up around them. Gamers are happy to spend their fiat money on virtual tokens that can only be used in a certain game. This concept has seen the gold mining industry in World of Warcraft pass the “$2 billion mark”, while in-game revenue in FarmVille is now over $1 billion.

Non-gamers tend to need to make a mental shift to value digital money as much as the paper currency they can hold in their hand, whereas gamers already understand that digital tokens can be just as valuable to them.

The global gaming industry is continuing to grow at an impressive rate. According to a forecast from analysts Newzoo, the $134.9 billion market value in 2018 was a 10.9% increase on the figure achieved in 2017. As more new gamers appear, the concept of cryptocurrencies is likely to be more widely accepted.

Players Spend These Currencies to Buy Games or to Play

It is still a fairly common assumption that Bitcoin can only really be used by gamers. Indeed, it is easy to imagine that some people have failed to invest in cryptocurrencies so far because they believe it is of no use unless they play games.

While there are now many other ways of spending Bitcoin, it is true that gamers can spend or earn these coins more easily than other people. On many sites, it is possible to buy games and there are games where you use virtual coins as you play. Steam has stopped accepting this currency but others, such as MMOGA and Microsoft, let you shop with virtual coins.

A case where future progress is expected is in internet casinos, where Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals make sense. At the moment, there is a limited number of Bitcoin casinos. The big-name casinos, the ones with dozens of slots, table games and live dealer lobbies, such as Paddy Power, have so far tended to stick to traditional payment methods.

If acceptance of cryptocurrencies goes mainstream, with gaming sites like this beginning to adopt them, the demand for them will greatly increase. People will also become more trusting of cryptocurrencies if they begin to use them on a regular basis for something that gives them a lot of pleasure.

Indeed, the world of gaming is still closely linked to cryptocurrencies. There is a good chance that any major growth in the future will be linked to gamers and how they spend their money online.

Bitcoin appeared to lose vital $7k support earlier this week dropping to $6.9K on the 5th of August, but a small rally may soon be on the horizon from technical analysis of the charts.

What we might be seeing at the moment is a bearish decline from taking into consideration the 50-day moving average (MA) where selling pressure failed to push the price lower than $6.9k due to the strong resistance.

At the time of writing the price reached $7,287.91 on Huobi with Bithumb not far behind at $7,255.52 per Bitcoin, but western exchanges are much slow on the corrective rally with the price at $7,188.46.

At the time of writing the the price of one Bitcoin on the largest exchange by 24 hour volume, BitForex is $7,098.84

This strong buying support behind the 50-day moving average could be an early indicator of a bullish August with a rally towards $7,500 – $7,600 expected.

This change of market is based on strong rumours circulating that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may finally give the green light to a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) at the end of this week when the SEC meet on the 10th of August.

In other news major Swiss-based banks, CoinBase and Goldman Sachs are enhancing custody services for their big institutional clients which will see a secure cryptocurrency service for storing large amounts of crypto.

What do you think will happen to the Bitcoin price this week?